12 Step Programme to Becoming a Preventer
by musubi.kei
Summary: Major Zechs' 12-Step Programme to Becoming a Preventer -- Post series, Pre-EW, 6&9 -- A certain year and two days in brief, from Zechs' shoes.


**A/N**: Merry X'mas, and to better days...  
(to my precious readers, thank you for being patient with me!)

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「**Major Zechs' 12-Step Programme to Becoming A Preventer**」

_Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries. __  
__**...**_

(**i**) He woke in darkness, to the mindless, pleasant chatter nurses sometimes adopt when working with comatose patients. It took a while for him to realise that she was speaking to him, largely because she used a name unfamiliar to him: Duo Maxwell.

(**ii**) Fortunately, the nurse took his addled response to be a side effect of his medication. They had not expected him to be conscious for at least another week.

(**1**) That first day, he said nothing and listened closely to the activities around him, like a good soldier stuck behind enemy lines.

(**2**) By the second day, he had learnt that he was in a secret bed in the back room of a small hospital on an L2 Colony, that he can expect physical rehabilitation within three to four years, and that there were two nurses assigned to his immediate care, Faith and Charity.

(**3**) He was unsure of how he made it through to the third day with his chastity intact, given the atmosphere whenever one or both of the ladies were in the room, and, to be honest, he was not completely sure he had.

(**4**) On the fourth day, a girl announced as Hilde Schebeiker came to see him; he braced himself against discovery, dreadfully aware of his vulnerability, until he felt her presence, carried through the door on soft, militant footsteps he would have recognised anywhere, and relaxed.

(**5**) She stood over him for the longest time saying nothing, then sat down on the edge of his bed, light as an angel's feather, and quietly told him about the ceasefire that had unanimously, spontaneously, sprung up across Earth and Colonies alike in the past five days, and how the ashes from the Libra-Peacemillion crash fell across half the world like Christmas snow— he listened in disengaged silence, feeling nothing at all, until his hand flexed of its own accord and bumped into her fingertips, and he burst into silent tears that disappeared safely into his cage of bandages.

(**6**) He checked himself out against the doctor's recommendations, six weeks being the longest he could bear to be off his feet, not to mention the distressing attentions of the swooning Faith and Charity, which "Hilde" later thought quite hilarious; he'd always felt she was slightly cruel that way.

(**7**) In July, he woke up one morning to find a blank plastic card bearing nothing but a geo-coordinate stuck in the inside crack of his doorframe and wondered when and how she became involved with Earth again; perhaps, in retrospect, he could have paid more attention to her comings and goings, but he had not wanted to seem the stalker.

(**8**) Eight times he'd stood in front of her door since February, and each time he had raised his hand to knock, only to let it fall mutely back to his side again, unable to find a good enough reason to call on her and unable to find voice enough to call her.

(**9**) He saw her on the nine o'clock news, just for a moment, from the corner of a panning camera at the Earth Sphere President's Christmas Eve speech, and suddenly none of that mattered— how could he have forgotten who he was? Flying by the seat of his pants is trademark of the pilot once known as the Lightning Count! So what if he did not know what to say? They'll figure something out. They always do.

(**10**) He barely caught the ten o'clock shuttle to Earth and spent most of the trip locked in the onboard bathroom, sprucing up.

(**11**) By the time he got to the car rental service, he was starting to feel that old spark again, humming in his bones, roaring in his ears, he took the fastest car in the lot, a new Bugatti model in the style of the classic Piper P2, and discovered Shostakovich's _Year 1905_ Symphony on the radio, which he smiled at and cranked up to eleven.

(**12**) It was well past midnight when he pulled up at the coordinates, much later than his dramatic imperatives preferred, still just in time to catch the bizarre broadcast sent across the world by a slightly mad little girl, and he shrugged off the resignation that the world was not yet done with him and walked through the glass doors.

(**iii**) Afterwards, he realised, if he had given some thought to it, he would never have expected her to be behind that big, important, desk. It was simply not her style.

(**iv**) It was, however, perfectly in keeping with her style to gently nudge, push and manipulate things around her to the way she thought it should be. He should never have worried about what to say to her, he chuckled at himself, when he climbed into the Talgeese III cockpit and saw that someone —she— had scratched a Christmas message to him under the dashboard: **ゼクス****専****用**

**…**

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**Glossary:  
****ゼクス****専用**, "Zechs Custom", in the tradition of Char Custom Mechas.

**A/N P.S.**: also, yes... Duo should be running into trouble with the L2 medicare system any day now for "skipping out" on his "hospital bills"... it's his fault, really, for spilling his life story to Noin.


End file.
